Hear Me Out: Beach House, 'Elegy to the Void'

This is probably pure, pretentious coincidence, but “Elegy to the Void,” Beach House’s single from their surprise album “Thank Your Lucky Stars,” shares a title with Cathleen Schine’s beautiful 2011 New York Review of Books write-up about Joan Didion’s “Blue Nights.” Even if vocalist Victoria Legrand and instrumentalist savant Alex Scally didn’t lift the title, however, the likening between their work and “Blue Nights” is oddly compelling. Both works are dark, cerebral, and focused on death. Both works also operate outside of time, trading in political commentary or relevance for something more elemental. Beach House’s elegy, like Didion’s farewell to her daughter, is a restrained, heartbreaking examination of mortality.

After releasing an album every two years since 2005, Beach House has had a wild 2015, offering “Depression Cherry” in August only to drop their unexpected second album in three months last week. Both are fantastically produced, full of interesting lyrical ideas, and sadder than anything Beach House has put out before (which is saying something). The latter is more brooding and referential but not a dramatic departure by any means. Far from being a standout because of its difference, then, “Elegy to the Void,” with its simplistic arpeggios, imagistic poetry, and piercing guitar counter-melody, may be the purest distillation of the duo’s lasting identity. What separates the track is its epic dimensions. The song, which stretches to almost seven minutes, relentlessly tackles the darkest of questions during its gradual build into a guitar solo and final verse that, while devoid of a clear crescendo, feels almost aggressively loud.

“Black clock looming distant / You’re a great white,” Legrand laments near the beginning of her lyric. This clock, perhaps the void itself, is present in every stanza, be it in “a garden of remains,” “the altar,” “the mirror,” and, at the end, “the night.” Legrand intones these seeming sublimations of death with such an ethereal effect that it’s hard not to feel scared. But Scally’s guitar work, oddly comforting, static, and familiar, keeps the song from entering into the macabre. This instrumentation, reverberating as if in a fishbowl, provides the humanistic backbone to the singer’s chilling words. Taken in concert, “Elegy to the Void” is a remarkably tragic and technically stunning work in what has been an overwhelming, yet mostly positive, year for Beach House.